As a quilter, I think it’s appropriate that I’m “on pins and needles,” don’t you? At this moment, we are Due Date Minus THREE Days. We’re having a baby!

No idea if it’s a boy or a girl, we’re just praying for healthy with the full complement of fingers and toes. Sweet anticipation. Jennie and Craig, you’re going to be a wonderful parents. I can’t stop smiling.

And for the record, the quilt was finished before the baby arrived—with matching crib skirt, assorted crib sheets, puddle pads, and receiving blankets.

I did have help. Inspiration for the baby’s first quilt came from a tutorial by Jennifer Grigoryev. I used 6″ white squares, so the scale is a little larger.

I used gray thread for the quilting (to match the walls). And, I’m particularly happy with the little sliver of turquoise in the binding. It’s sewn in, not a flange. (Images get bigger when you click them.)

Thanks for all the wonderful suggestions on what to make for the baby. I’ll share what I learned soon. And if you don’t hear the shrieks of delight when the baby is born, I’ll blog and put it in my newsletter for sure.

UPDATE

Zoey Bea was born on October 12, 2014. She weighed 5 pounds, 11 ounces. She is just a smidge over half a yard long–my little Fat Quarter.

I love the ceramic Bohin marking pencils. They make a thin, perpetually sharp line that I can see. The line stays on just long enough to quilt or applique through. And, it totally comes out with a light wash or by erasing.

With Bohin refills (6 of each color per pack) I have my choice of white, gray, pink, green, and yellow, depending on the fabric I’m marking.

I’m including a BIC mechanical pencil with each color refill I sell on my web page until I run out.

Here’s how to make Pencil Pocket to keep them all organized. (Click images.)

Step #1: Remove the Pencil Lead
Push the eraser on top of the pencil several times to advance the lead that comes inside the pencil. When you’ve got enough poking out the tip to grab onto, about 1/2″, push the eraser down and hold it down. Yank out the lead. Gently twist off the eraser and dump the other two leads out. Then insert the Bohin ceramic leads from the container. The pencil will hold all 6. Replace the eraser.

Step #2: Cut Fabric
Find two coordinating fabrics, one for the outside of the Pencil Pocket, and one for the inside. (I picked a funky black and a wild pink.) Layer them right sides together. Cut both fabrics at the same time into two 5″ x 5″ squares. They’ll be ready to sew in the next step.

Step #3: Sew
With right sides together and raw edges even (you just cut them like that so they should be perfect) stitch 1/4″ from the raw edges with thread that matches either one fabric or the other. Leave a 3″ opening so that you can turn them right side out. (Backstitch at the beginning and ending to that the stitches won’t come out in the next step.

Step #4: Trim & Turn
Trim all four corners to reduce bulk. You’ll be cutting off a teeny tiny triangle from each corner. Then, reach into the opening and turn the two stitched squares right sides out. Push out the corners with your finger. If there is still fabric stuck in there, take the BIC mechanical pencil, push the eraser down, hold it down, and push whatever lead might be sticking out at the other end up and into the barrel of the pencil. Use the pointy end of the pencil to gently coerce the fabric out. Be careful not to poke the pencil through the fabric. Make sure the sides are fully turned as well. If they’re not popping out, stick a straight pin in the seam and carefully lift them out.

Step #5: Press
Once the corners and sides are fully turned and straight, turn under the seam allowances at the opening. Press.

Step #6: FoldTwice
With the opening at the bottom (you’re right, it has not been sewn shut yet) fold the Pencil Pocket in half vertically. Then fold over the upper right corner diagonally until it meets the vertical fold as shown. Press.

Step #7: Sew Button
Open the long vertical fold, center the button, and sew it on. (It’s easier to sew the button on before the next step.)

Step #8: Sew & Finish
Refold the long vertical fold. Line up the edges along the bottom and right side. With thread that matches the “outside” fabric of the Pencil Pocket, stitch close to the edges, backstitching to secure ends, as shown. The stitching will complete the pocket as it closes the opening.

Step #9: Move In
Clip the BIC mechanical pencils to the back of the Pencil Pocket so they won’t fall out.

Now that you know how to make a Pencil Pocket, order your Bohin refills here. They come with the colorful mechanical pencils like you see here.

I’ve shared that I make quilts for nieces and nephews. Now we’re on the second generation, quilt #2. This is Lee’s Quilt and I added something a little different. I “signed it” with a QR code. A what?!

A QR code, or Quick Response code, is a type of bar code. It is read by a machine and contains information about the object to which it is attached, like this quilt. W-H-A-T?!

This is a QR code for AmiSimms.com. Great. Now what? Well, if you had a smart phone, you would download a free app like QR Reader and you would hold it up to the computer monitor, line up this little black and white code through your smart phone camera, wait for the little beep, and you would magically be taken to my website.

(Don’t ask me what to do if you are reading this blog post on your smart phone, although there is probably an app for that too!)

My website. Big deal.

Wait! There’s more! You can purchase a QR code professionally printed onto a fabric label. They are called Story Patches and they come in “sew-on” or “iron-on.” Incidentally, while I appliqued this onto the quilt after the top was finished, I could just as easily have pieced it in. And, it would have lived just as happily on the back of the quilt as on the front of the quilt. Watch the video to see how the QR code works and to see close-ups of the quilt.

The hardest part is deciding what you want the QR code to do. In addition to linking it to a video message, you could link it to a photograph, an audio message, or a written document. Best of all, you can change the video, photo, audio message or document any time you want. The QR code can be “read” by scanning, or by entering the letter code into a web site. There’s no expiration on the QR code either. They’re also washable.

If you’d like to try a Story Patch (QR code) on your next quilt, I carry both the sew-on and the iron-on in my online store . Click here. If I’m coming to your quilt guild I’ll be happy to save you shipping and hand deliver these and/or any other lightweight items to you when I come. Just give me some advance notice.

My quilting career began almost 40 years ago in an Amish home in northern Indiana. I thought the women gathered around the quilting frame in the living room were sewing on a trampoline. I was clueless. They asked me if I wanted to quilt too. Of course I said yes. I wanted them to like me. I figured if they liked me they would invite me to come live with them and then I could learn about Amish culture by participating in it. And then I could write a really long paper with lots of footnotes and graduate from college.

They asked if I wanted a thimble. I declined. They giggled. I bled. Not only did I jab my finger on the underside of the quilt with the point of the needle, but I rammed the eye of the needle into the top finger too—the one that should have been wearing the thimble.

I made huge ugly stitches but I didn’t give up. They assumed I could sew. I didn’t tell them that my sewing was limited to the apron I butchered in Home Eck, and the Superman outfit (complete with cape and tail cozy) that I had sewed for our cat. Years later, my Amish friend told me they ripped out all my stitches after I left. I don’t know what they did about the blood.

As luck would have it, my Amish friend invited me home for dinner after the quilting. She probably thought if I was as good a cook as I was a quilter I would starve to death without intervention. That day changed my life. There’s just no other way to put it. I began visiting the family, staying a few days at a time, and have been blessed with a friendship that not only enriched my life, but nurtured a passion for quilting. I did get better at quilting. It would have been hard to get any worse. I never got very good at milking or driving the buggy. In fact, when my friend Ida let me take over the buggy reins (above), the horse knew a total amateur was at the helm. Joe (the horse) turned around, looked me in the eye, and then marched off the side of the road!

I’ll be going back to Amishland again at the end of June. This time I’ll be teaching for the Shipshewana Quilt Festival. I hope you can come. I’ll be giving two lectures, a workshop, several Schoolhouse lessons, in-store demonstrations, and I’ll be part of a panel discussion too. Come! You will feel right at home. See the quilt show, visit the vendor mall, check out the local quilt shops, and events. Don’t forget to come by and say “Hi.”

Piecing Sticky Template Plastic couldn’t be easier. And that’s great because once you use Sticky Template Plastic for small shapes, you’re going to want to use it on large shapes too.

I just finished making Carol Cruise’s Baby Bear (www.CarolsZoo.com) and thought I’d show you how to piece Sticky Template Plastic for the larger Mama Bear pattern, with Carol’s permission, of course.

Step 1: Iron the paper pattern on low heat. You will still be able to see and feel the fold lines because Carol uses sturdy paper for her patterns but it’s important to iron the creases out and make the paper FLAT.

Step 2: See how many sheets of Sticky Template Plastic you need. It looks like I can do this pattern with 3 sheets and a small piece leftover Sticky Template Plastic from another project. I want to make sure I cover every bit of the design.

Click the images to see them larger.

Step 3: For small shapes the release paper is removed and the Sticky Template Plastic is placed sticky side up on a flat surface. For larger shapes and multiple pieces of Sticky Template Plastic, the pattern is on the flat surface, right side up.

Peel the release paper off the first sheet of Sticky Template Plastic and place it on the pattern. Make sure you know exactly where it needs to go before you lower it onto the paper pattern. ( Line it up by looking at the top and the left side of the pattern.)

Step 4: Remove the release paper from the next sheet of Sticky Template Plastic. Hold it at an angle against the edge of the piece already in place with just the edge touching, not the sticky surface. Make sure the edges align at the sides as well. Then, lower the rest of the second sheet onto the pattern.

Step 5: Peel and stick the next sheet of Sticky Template Plastic, holding it an an angle against the edge of the sheets already stuck to the pattern. Lower it to the pattern.

Step 6: Here’s my scrap piece of Sticky Template Plastic. It was a “corner” so I knew it was a perfect right angle with two straight sides. If it wasn’t a corner I would have made sure that the left side, the side touching the previously placed sheet of Sticky Template Plastic, was perfectly straight. Notice that I dropped it down a little. Because there was space between the back and the front pattern pieces, no sense wasting the Sticky Template Plastic. I also had slid a corner of the release paper underneath as I placed the sheet in Step 5, again so as to have some leftovers for other projects. You can see the release paper way over on the right.

Step 7: To keep the entire template (composed of several pieces of Sticky Template Plastic) rigid, cut scraps of Stitch Template Plastic about 1/2″ wide and stick them over the “seam.” They don’t need to cover the entire seam. (The other lines you see in the image are fold lines. Those are secure under the Sticky Template Plastic.) The joins won’t interfere with the performance of the template in any way, in fact they may help when templates are flipped over to cut the reverse shape (for the other side of the bear) because they will keep the slippery side of the plastic from sliding on the fabric. If you want the template to fold (so you can store it more easily) skip this step. Just know that over time the original paper pattern will tear at the fold. And, the more pieces of Sticky Template Plastic you use, the more difficult it will be to fold.

I’ve been sworn to secrecy until today, but now I get to spill the beans: I’m going to be a grandmother!

Our daughter Jennie and her husband Craig are expecting their first child in October. That would be our first grandchild. Just call me Grandma.

Let me first say that Babies R Us has seriously missed the boat with their lack of gender-unknown clothing selections. Within hours of receiving the news (that of which I could not speak until today) I drove right over to Babies R Us. Time to change the store’s name to Frustrated B Me. There were racks and racks of “girl baby” clothes and racks and racks of “boy baby” clothes, but there wasn’t even a section for “we won’t know until it’s born” clothes. I literally bought everything there was in the whole store for “either or” gender, size 3 months and under and I carried it out in one bag. Apparently ducks are big if you’re waiting to be surprised.

Baby’s ultrasound was the first photographs of my grandchild. (Excuse me, of Jennie and Craig’s baby.) I was as mystified by the ultrasound as I was by Babies R Us. I pretended to see the little head, and the little limbs. It wasn’t until Jennie told me where to zoom in (3 weeks later) that I could actually see these things.

I am following along on my What To Expect iPhone app and we are now in Week 12, Day 6. Never having been pregnant, I find this all totally amazing. The baby has grown from poppy seed to blueberry, to raspberry, to green olive, to prune, to large plum, and now to peach! I’m guessing that grapefruit it next.

After the disappointing visit to Babies R Us, I hit JoAnn’s to check out the patterns. Not a single long sleeved, footed sleeper with the zipper that runs from neck to crotch and then down one leg. I checked all the pattern books. I’m just going to have to reverse engineer one! I did meet a woman at the airport who showed me how to knit baby hats on a loom. I think I’ve made 27 so far. Poor little kid has nothing to wear but hats!

I think I’m OK in the quilt department, but I’m going to need your help with other things I can sew, along with your coolest ideas for baby shower stuff. I probably won’t have a chance to moderate/read your comments until Wednesday, but please share all your good baby advice where it says COMMENT.

So last week Mom and Dad went to see Maizie in Ann Arbor. She is my niece dog. (I am Uncle Scooter.) I had to stay home. Anyway, I’m not sure when or how I did this, but I flipped or scrunched, or did something and my dog tags got twisted and caught in my kennel, near the bottom, just by the door.

The picture above is a reenactment. Since I couldn’t see what happened I asked Mom. Mom said she really didn’t notice. She just couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t coming out when she opened the kennel door. I love my “house” but I love Mom and Dad more so when they come home I always come out, shake, and then greet them, showing them my tail and attached rump, which are my best features.

Well, I didn’t come out. Since I was facing the other door, Mom opened the other door. (My house has two doors.) When I still didn’t come out, Mom saw what happened and clicked off my collar. We don’t have a reenactment of that, but she was super fast. Then I came out and shook, and you know, showed them my behind.

Mom was really freaked out. She loved me up more than usual, which is a lot. And she kept staring at me all day and followed me around. This is hard to do because usually I follow her around. So we went in circles. She wanted to see if I was traumatized. My illustrious predecessor, Madison, went a little nutso after a thunder storm zapped the power and set the alarm off in the house when he was home alone. He was never the same since. As Mom has mentioned before, I am different. Way different. Nothing bothers me. I went in my house several times, just like normal, so Mom was reassured I was OK. I am nutso in other ways. The same ways as before.

That night Mom invented a special thing for my collar. It’s called a Tag Restraint. Or a Sock Collar. Maybe we should call it the No Jingle Thing.

She cut up a piece of microfleece that just happened to be on the floor and just happened to match my collar exactly. (The sewing room is a magical place.) My collar is 1.5″ wide, so she cut the strip 3″ wide and about 9″ long. The straight of grain ran the long way. I don’t know what that means except that the material stretched more sideways than longways so it would stretch to go over my dog tags.

Mom doesn’t know how to use a serger, so she picked stitch #12 on her Bernina which moves the fabric up and down as it sews. The seam is stretchy that way. She sewed a 1/4″ seam and then turned the tube right side-out and pulled it over the part of my collar that has my dog tags.

So now my collar looks like a snake that ate a mouse. I have never met a snake before, but I would like to lick a mouse, and I know it’s not really a mouse in there, so I like it. Plus it makes me silent. Except for the gallumphing when I run. After all, I am a big beast with thundering paws!

Here I am posing with my tennis ball. The snow is melting now and the lawn is growing balls. Spring is wonderful.

Anyway, I am now Stealth Dog. Except when I bark.

That reminds me; I have a funny story to tell you. So I noticed a wild turkey in the back yard yesterday. They fly in from time to time. They have to fly in because the yard has a big fence around it and they are not incredibly intelligent and they can’t find the gates to open and walk in. Come to think of it, neither can I. Oh well, continuing….

So I spot the turkey. I bark and bark like a maniac, you know like when we have a home invasion. We have those all the time, mostly squirrels in the yard, the UPS delivery, visitors, the dog three houses down, loud birds, wind if there is nothing else going on. Mom tells me to shush. And this is where not paying attention to her really pays off. So she comes to the slidey door to see why I am berserking. She sees the turkey at the back fence about 100 feet away. Then she tells me it’s a bird and birds are our friends. Then I think she segued into a recipe for lemon meringue pie. I really wasn’t listening after BIRD. I think she said I could chase it but it would just fly away, I don’t know. Like I said I wasn’t really listening.

Then she opened the door! I was out like a shot. I chased the turkey back and forth across the yard. First we went fast, then I just loped after it. Then we sped up again. Then Mom was running after us. What a great game! I’m barking, Mom is yelling, and the bird is loving it because he’s not flying away! We have GREAT birds here. The turkey is just running as fast as his little legs can carry him, just like Saturday morning cartoons except for the background music.

By time Mom caught me by the Stealth Collar, the turkey had taken a header in some leaves. It just fell over. I was trying to revive it by sniffing it vigorously in all its places but Mom pulled me into the house. Then Dad went out to investigate. I barked from inside. Dad looked for it by the leaves but it was gone. Then we all saw it walking around by the back fence again! So Dad opened the gate and it walked out. I have looked everywhere for it, but I think Dad scared it away.

That was all very exciting. I think you should watch my video so you can rest a little. I will bark if you don’t. Come to think of it, I might bark if you do!

Pleases remember: if you get this blog in your email box, click the TITLE of the blog post (in blue) to get the video to play and to enlarge the images. Clicking the TITLE will take you directly to my blog, where all the good stuff happens.